From: David H. <dh...@ma...> - 2005-02-13 21:39:04
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I am remotely administering my daughter's new iMac G5 located in her dorm room. The hard drive "crashed" last Nov, and it was then that I discovered smartmontools. It turned out the girls blew a fuse with too many hair dryers going, and the iMac lost its partition map. Several low numbered sectors were clobbered, but I was basically able to recover all the files on the disk (with the excellent Data Rescue tool from Prosoft- they do Windows too). I should have set up smartd but didn't - and the disk crashed again - its now a lot worse with thousands of bad sectors. Using a combination of tools to replicate the "good sectors" on another large disk it looks like I will recover many files (but any given one may have a bunch of ascii " " chars in the middle (they replaced the data on unreadable sectors). So, now I am doing this in earnest. A few comments: 1) I did a build with the latest source around Nov 20th 2004. I tested with 10.3.6 initially in 2004, 10.3.7 in Jan, and now with 10.3.8. Smartctl is working just fine [did not run smartd yet.] 2) The documentation in INSTALL and on the HOME page say that "-t short" will not work, but it works fine for me on several drives. This note should be removed. 3) The smartmontools home page gives instructions for downloading and building the tools (this is what I did). However, it should have a comment on the "./configure" line like "./configure [special options - see INSTALL file]" 4) On Darwin, I get a small percentage of failures when running smartctl. What happens is tht I run a command and get an error that this device does not support SMART. I immediately re-run the exact same command (usually a -a) and it works just fine. Something (probably on Darwin) is amiss. I guess I should have looked at the return code but did not. 5) Regarding Darwin, it would be nice to have a Darwin specific README (getting the daemon to run, etc). There is a really nice perl program called "sendEmail" - it makes a nice companion to smartd. What it does is allow you to use a command line tool to send email through a smtp point (so you don't have to set up sendmail on your local mac.) It is this program I will use on my daughters mac to get smartd to send me email when smartd finds a problem. This is a great program suite, and is the reason I joined sourceforge as a paying member! David |
From: Geoffrey K. <ge...@ge...> - 2005-02-14 23:01:45
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David Hoerl <dh...@ma...> writes: > 4) On Darwin, I get a small percentage of failures when running > smartctl. What happens is tht I run a command and get an error that > this device does not support SMART. I immediately re-run the exact > same command (usually a -a) and it works just fine. Something > (probably on Darwin) is amiss. I guess I should have looked at the > return code but did not. I believe this happens when the drive is asleep, and Darwin doesn't wait long enough for it to spin up. I'm not sure if Darwin should wait longer, or if smartd should just not try to talk to a sleeping drive, or both. |
From: Bruce A. <ba...@gr...> - 2005-04-20 06:56:25
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On 14 Feb 2005, Geoffrey Keating wrote: > David Hoerl <dh...@ma...> writes: > > > 4) On Darwin, I get a small percentage of failures when running > > smartctl. What happens is tht I run a command and get an error that > > this device does not support SMART. I immediately re-run the exact > > same command (usually a -a) and it works just fine. Something > > (probably on Darwin) is amiss. I guess I should have looked at the > > return code but did not. > > I believe this happens when the drive is asleep, and Darwin doesn't > wait long enough for it to spin up. I'm not sure if Darwin should > wait longer, or if smartd should just not try to talk to a sleeping > drive, or both. Geoff, I suppose we could insert a 'get powermode' command and then if necessary a few seconds of sleeping in the code. Is it worth it? Cheers, Bruce |
From: Geoff K. <ge...@ge...> - 2005-04-20 18:47:33
Attachments:
smime.p7s
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On 19/04/2005, at 11:55 PM, Bruce Allen wrote: > On 14 Feb 2005, Geoffrey Keating wrote: > >> David Hoerl <dh...@ma...> writes: >> >>> 4) On Darwin, I get a small percentage of failures when running >>> smartctl. What happens is tht I run a command and get an error that >>> this device does not support SMART. I immediately re-run the exact >>> same command (usually a -a) and it works just fine. Something >>> (probably on Darwin) is amiss. I guess I should have looked at the >>> return code but did not. >> >> I believe this happens when the drive is asleep, and Darwin doesn't >> wait long enough for it to spin up. I'm not sure if Darwin should >> wait longer, or if smartd should just not try to talk to a sleeping >> drive, or both. > > Geoff, I suppose we could insert a 'get powermode' command and then if > necessary a few seconds of sleeping in the code. Is it worth it? I don't think there is any supported way to find out if a drive is asleep. After thinking some more about it, I decided that the right thing to do is to have Darwin wait longer, but also there should be a way to find out if the drive is asleep, so I filed a bug asking for that; I'll see how that goes. I guess this should be documented, how about this patch? *** WARNINGS.~1.31.~ Fri Nov 12 12:43:31 2004 --- WARNINGS Wed Apr 20 11:47:13 2005 *************** *** 115,124 **** DARWIN ------ ! SYSTEM: Any system up to at least 7H63 PROBLEM: Can't switch off SMART, can't switch off auto-save, can't run short tests. REPORTER: Geoff Keating <ge...@ge...> NOTE: There's a bug in the system library: when you ask it to do any of these things, it does the inverse (switches on, runs extended tests). Radar 3727283. --- 115,132 ---- DARWIN ------ ! SYSTEM: Any system before Tiger PROBLEM: Can't switch off SMART, can't switch off auto-save, can't run short tests. REPORTER: Geoff Keating <ge...@ge...> NOTE: There's a bug in the system library: when you ask it to do any of these things, it does the inverse (switches on, runs extended tests). Radar 3727283. + + SYSTEM: All known systems + PROBLEM: When drive is asleep, SMART commands fail + REPORTER: Geoff Keating <ge...@ge...> + NOTE: You can prevent the drive from sleeping by saying + pmset -a disksleep 0 + or by unchecking the 'Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible' + checkbox in the Energy Saver preferences. Radar 4094403. |
From: Bruce A. <ba...@gr...> - 2005-04-20 18:53:29
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> > Geoff, I suppose we could insert a 'get powermode' command and then if > > necessary a few seconds of sleeping in the code. Is it worth it? > > I don't think there is any supported way to find out if a drive is > asleep. > > After thinking some more about it, I decided that the right thing to do > is to have Darwin wait longer, but also there should be a way to find > out if the drive is asleep, so I filed a bug asking for that; I'll see > how that goes. > > I guess this should be documented, how about this patch? Looks good. Please apply. Cheers, Bruce |